Remote Workers Aren't Just Individuals. They're An Economic Sector Worth Targeting
They're affluent and they seek a high quality of life. Economic development folks should go after treat them as a target just like a factory or a company.
On Monday, I wrote about what I got right and what I got wrong about cities after COVID when based on the predictions I made five years ago when the pandemic got started.
But I realized afterward that most urbanists – including me – tend to talk about these changes in negative terms, like feeling sorry for all those poor downtowns that don’t have all those office workers anymore.
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And that got me thinking that maybe we need to talk about this whole thing in a different ways. Like, for example, maybe we should talk about what cities (and suburbs) can do to take advantage of the changes that COVID brought about.
A crowded restaurant on suburban Long Island
Which brings me back, once again, to the framing I have used since I started writing this Future Of Where Substack newsletter last fall: The Urban Hotel and the Suburban Workshop. Because that’s the biggest change we saw as a result of COVID: The move to remove and hybrid work. And that’s the change that has affected cities and suburbs the most.
Who Benefits From Remote Work
Let’s begin by understanding what’s really going on.
First, the percentage of workers who work remotely has gone up a lot. According to the Census Bureau, that number went from 5.7% in 2019 to 13.8% in 2023, though it was higher in the interim during the peak of the pandemic. And that doesn’t even count hybrid workers, who only go to the office two or three days a week. (I’m currently in Downtown Washington, D.C., which was dead on Monday but booming on Tuesday.)
But second – and maybe just as important – remote workers are far more affluent than everybody else. They are, of course, office workers, not blue-collar or service workers, and they tend to be more highly educated. Relying again on the Census Bureau’s statistics, take a look at this chart, which shows that remote workers in major cities typically make 50-80% more than everybody else.
What this really means is that an enormous amount of buying power has shifted from downtowns and job centers to the suburbs. In Nassau County on Long Island, for example, close to half of the county’s workers before the pandemic worked in New York City, many of them in now-desolate Midtown Manhattan. So it should be surprising that sales tax revenue in Nassau County, after being flat for a decade spiked during and after the pandemic, going from $1.2 billion in 2019 to $1.5 billion in 2023.
Remote Workers: The New Economic Development Target
So who benefits from all this buying power? Not the cities and suburbs that attract companies, but cities and suburbs that attract remote workers. And so, instead of thinking of remote workers as individuals, we should start thinking about them as an economic sector.
Just as economic development strategies revolved around the creatives a decade or two ago, perhaps now they should revolve around remote work. Tulsa is famously offering $10,000 to remote workers who move there. But is giving money away to remote workers the best way to attract them? Maybe not. So here are three ways cities – and suburbs – can attract and cash in on remote workers.